“I’ll be right back with that blood,” I said cheerfully, smiling wide enough to show every tooth in my head.
To heck with him,
I thought righteously.
Him and the horse he rode in on.
After that it was strictly business. I smiled and worked, and worked and smiled. I stayed away from Sam, because I didn’t want to have a long conversation with yet another shifter that evening. I was afraid—since I didn’t have any reason to be mad at Sam—that if he asked me what was wrong, I’d tell him; and I just didn’t want to talk about it. You ever just feel like stomping around and being miserable for a while? That was the kind of mood I was in.
But I had to go over to Sam, after all, when Catfish asked if he could pay with a check for this evening’s festivities. That was Sam’s rule: he had to approve checks. And I had to stand close to Sam, because the bar was very noisy.
I thought nothing of it, aside from not wanting to get into my own mood with him, but when I bent over him to explain Catfish’s cash-flow problem, Sam’s eyes widened. “My God, Sookie,” he said, “Who have you been around?”
I backed off, speechless. He was both shocked and appalled by a smell I hadn’t even known I carried. I was tired of supes pulling this on me.
“Where’d you meet up with a tiger?” he asked.
“A tiger,” I repeated numbly.
So now I knew what my new acquaintance Quinn turned into when the moon was full.
“Tell me,” Sam demanded.
“No,” I snapped, “I won’t. What about Catfish?”
“He can write a check this once. If there’s a problem, he’ll never write another one here again.”
I didn’t relay this last sentence. I took Catfish’s check and his alcohol-fueled gratitude, and deposited both where they belonged.
To make my bad mood worse, I snagged my silver chain on a corner of the bar when I bent over to pick up a napkin some slob had tossed to the floor. The chain broke, and I caught it up and dropped it in my pocket. Dammit. This had been a rotten day, followed by a rotten night.
I made sure to wave at Selah as she and Bill left. He’d left me a good tip, and I stuffed it in my other pocket with so much force I almost ripped the fabric. A couple of times during the evening, I had heard the bar phone ring, and when I was taking some dirty glasses to the kitchen hatch, Charles said, “Someone keeps calling and hanging up. Very irritating.”
“They’ll get tired and quit,” I said soothingly.
About an hour later, as I put a Coke in front of Sam, the busboy came to tell me there was someone at the employees’ entrance, asking for me.
“What were you doing outside?” Sam asked sharply.
The boy looked embarrassed. “I smoke, Mr. Merlotte,” he said. “I was outside taking me a break, ’cause the vamp said he’d drain me if I lit up inside, when this man walked up outta nowhere.”
“What’s he look like?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s old, got black hair,” the boy said, shrugging. Not long on the gift of description.
“Okay,” I said. I was glad to take a break. I suspected who the visitor might be, and if he’d come into the bar, he’d have caused a riot. Sam found an excuse to follow me out by saying that he needed a pit stop, and he picked up his cane and used it to hobble down the hall after me. He had his own tiny bathroom off his office, and he limped into it as I continued past the men’s and women’s to the back door. I opened it cautiously and peered outside. But then I began smiling. The man waiting for me had one of the most famous faces in the world—except, apparently, to adolescent busboys.
“Bubba,” I said, pleased to see the vampire. You couldn’t call him by his former name, or he got real confused and agitated. Bubba was formerly known as . . . Well, let me just put it this way. You wondered about all those sightings after his death? This was the explanation.
The conversion hadn’t been a complete success because his system had been so fuddled with drugs; but aside from his predilection for cat blood, Bubba managed pretty well. The vampire community took good care of him. Eric kept Bubba on staff as an errand boy. Bubba’s glossy black hair was always combed and styled, his long sideburns sharply trimmed. Tonight he was wearing a black leather jacket, new blue jeans, and a black-and-silver plaid shirt.
“Looking good, Bubba,” I said admiringly.
“You too, Miss Sookie.” He beamed at me.
“Did you want to tell me something?”
“Yessum. Mr. Eric sent me over here to tell you that he’s not what he seems.”
I blinked.
“Who, Bubba?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle.
“He’s a hit man.”
I stared at Bubba’s face not because I thought staring would get me anywhere, but because I was trying to figure out the message. This was a mistake; Bubba’s eyes began darting from side to side, and his face lost its smile. I should have turned to stare at the wall—it would’ve given me as much information, and Bubba wouldn’t have become as anxious.
“Thanks, Bubba,” I said, patting him on his beefy shoulder. “You did good.”
“Can I go now? Back to Shreveport?”
“Sure,” I said. I would just call Eric. Why hadn’t he used the phone for a message as urgent and important as this one seemed to be?
“I found me a back way into the animal shelter,” Bubba confided proudly.
I gulped. “Oh, well, great,” I said, trying not to feel queasy.
“See ya later, alligator,” he called from the edge of the parking lot. Just when you thought Bubba was the worst vampire in the world, he did something amazing like moving at a speed you simply could not track.
“After a while, crocodile,” I said dutifully.
“Was that who I think it was?” The voice was right behind me.
I jumped. I spun around to find that Charles had deserted his post at the bar.
“You scared me,” I said, as though he hadn’t been able to tell.
“Sorry.”
“Yes, that was him.”
“Thought so. I’ve never heard him sing in person. It must be amazing.” Charles stared out at the parking lot as though he were thinking hard about something else. I had the definite impression he wasn’t listening to his own words.
I opened my mouth to ask a question, but before my words reached my lips I really thought about what the English pirate had just said, and the words froze in my throat. After a long hesitation, I knew I had to speak, or he would know something was wrong.
“Well, I guess I’d better get back to work,” I said, smiling the bright smile that pops onto my face when I’m nervous. And, boy, was I nervous now. The one blinding revelation I’d had made everything begin to click into place in my head. Every little hair on my arms and neck stood straight up. My fight-or-flight reflex was fixed firmly on “flight.” Charles was between the outside door and me. I began to back down the hall toward the bar.
The door from the bar into the hall was usually left open, because people had to pass into the hall all the time to use the bathrooms. But now it was closed. It had been open when I’d come down the hall to talk to Bubba.
This was bad.
“Sookie,” Charles said, behind me. “I truly regret this.”
“It was you who shot Sam, wasn’t it?” I reached behind me, fumbled for the handle that would open that door. He wouldn’t kill me in front of all those people, would he? Then I remembered the night Eric and Bill had polished off a roomful of men in my house. I remembered it had taken them only three or four minutes. I remembered what the men had looked like afterward.
“Yes. It was a stroke of luck when you caught the cook, and she confessed. But she didn’t confess to shooting Sam, did she?”
“No, she didn’t,” I said numbly. “All the others, but not Sam, and the bullet didn’t match.”
My fingers found the knob. If I turned it, I might live. But I might not. How much did Charles value his own life?
“You wanted the job here,” I said.
“I thought there was a good chance I’d come in handy when Sam was out of the picture.”
“How’d you know I’d go to Eric for help?”
“I didn’t. But I knew someone would tell him the bar was in trouble. Since that would mean helping you, he would do it. I was the logical one to send.”
“Why are you doing all this?”
“Eric owes a debt.”
He was moving closer, though not very quickly. Maybe he was reluctant to do the deed. Maybe he was hoping for a more advantageous moment, when he could carry me off in silence.
“It looks like Eric’s found out I’m not from the Jackson nest, as I’d said.”
“Yeah. You picked the wrong one.”
“Why? It seemed ideal to me. Many men there; you wouldn’t have seen them all. No one can remember all the men who’ve passed through that mansion.”
“But they’ve heard Bubba sing,” I said softly. “He sang for them one night. You’d never have forgotten that. I don’t know how Eric found out, but I knew as soon as you said you’d never—”
He sprang.
I was on my back on the floor in a split second, but my hand was already in my pocket, and he opened his mouth to bite. He was supporting himself on his arms, courteously trying not to actually lie on top of me. His fangs were fully out, and they glistened in the light.
“I have to do this,” he said. “I’m sworn. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” I said, and thrust the silver chain into his mouth, using the heel of my hand to snap his jaw shut.
He screamed and hit at me, and I felt a rib go, and smoke was coming out of his mouth. I scrambled away and did a little yelling of my own. The door flew open, and a flood of bar patrons thundered into the little hallway. Sam shot out of the door of his office like he’d been fired from a cannon, moving very well for a man with a broken leg, and to my amazement he had a stake in his hand. By that time, the screaming vampire was weighted down by so many beefy men in jeans you couldn’t even see him. Charles was trying to bite whoever he could, but his burned mouth was so painful his efforts were weak.
Catfish Hunter seemed to be on the bottom of the pile, in direct contact. “You pass me that stake here, boy!” he called back to Sam. Sam passed it to Hoyt Fortenberry, who passed it to Dago Guglielmi, who transferred it to Catfish’s hairy hand.
“We gonna wait for the vampire police, or we gonna take care of this ourselves?” Catfish asked. “Sookie?”
After a horrified second of temptation, I opened my mouth to say, “Call the police.” The Shreveport police had a squad of vampire policemen, as well as the necessary special transportation vehicle and special jail cells.
“End it,” said Charles, somewhere below the heaving pile of men. “I failed in my mission, and I can’t abide jails.”
“Okeydokey,” Catfish said, and staked him.
After it was over and the body had disintegrated, the men went back into the bar and settled down at the tables where they’d been before they heard the fight going on in the hall. It was beyond strange. There wasn’t much laughing, and there wasn’t much smiling, and no one who’d stayed in the bar asked anyone who’d left what had happened.
Of course, it was tempting to think this was an echo of the terrible old days, when black men had been lynched if there was even a rumor they’d winked at a white woman.
But, you know, the simile just didn’t hold. Charles was a different race, true. But he’d been guilty as hell of trying to kill me. I would have been a dead woman in thirty more seconds, despite my diversionary tactic, if the men of Bon Temps hadn’t intervened.
We were lucky in a lot of ways. There was not one law enforcement person in the bar that night. Not five minutes after everyone resumed his table, Dennis Pettibone, the arson investigator, came in to have a visit with Arlene. (The busboy was still mopping the hall, in fact.) Sam had bound my ribs with some Ace bandages in his office, and I walked out, slowly and carefully, to ask Dennis what he wanted to drink.
We were lucky that there weren’t any outsiders. No college guys from Ruston, no truckers from Shreveport, no relatives who’d dropped in for a beer with a cousin or an uncle.
We were lucky there weren’t many women. I don’t know why, but I imagined a woman would be more likely to get squeamish about Charles’s execution. In fact, I felt pretty squeamish about it, when I wasn’t counting my lucky stars I was still alive.
And Eric was lucky when he dashed into the bar about thirty minutes later, because Sam didn’t have any more stakes handy. As jittery as everyone was, some foolhardy soul would have volunteered to take out Eric: but he wouldn’t have come out of it relatively unscathed, as those who’d tackled Charles had.
And Eric was also lucky that the first words out of his mouth were “Sookie, are you all right?” In his anxiety, he grabbed me, one hand on either side of my waist, and I cried out.
“You’re hurt,” he said, and then realized five or six men had jumped to their feet.
“I’m just sore,” I said, making a huge effort to look okay. “Everything’s fine. This here’s my friend Eric,” I said a little loudly. “He’s been trying to get in touch with me, and now I know why it was so urgent.” I met the eyes of each man, and one by one, they dropped back into their seats.
“Let’s us go sit and talk,” I said very quietly.
“Where is he? I will stake the bastard myself, no matter what Hot Rain sends against me.” Eric was furious.
“It’s been taken care of,” I hissed. “Will you
chill
?”
With Sam’s permission, we went to his office, the only place in the building that offered both chairs and privacy. Sam was back behind the bar, perched on a high stool with his leg on a lower stool, managing the bartending himself.
“Bill searched his database,” Eric said proudly. “The bastard told me he came from Mississippi, so I wrote him down as one of Russell’s discarded pretty boys. I had even called Russell, to ask him if Twining had worked well for him. Russell said he had so many new vampires in the mansion, he had only the vaguest recollection of Twining. But Russell, as I observed at Josephine’s Bar, is not the kind of manager I am.”