“What about the security guard in the garage? Is he on duty all night?”
“Yes, because he’s the only line of defense between people sneaking into the garage and taking the elevator. You’ve always come in that way, but there are actually front doors to the building that face onto the major street. Those front doors are locked all the time. There’s no guard there, but you do have to have a key to get in.”
“So if someone could sneak past the guard, they could ride up in the elevator to your floor, without being stopped.”
“Oh, sure.”
“And that someone would have to pick the lock to the door.”
“Yes, and carry in a body, and stuff it in the closet. That sounds pretty unlikely,” said Alcide.
“But that’s apparently what happened. Oh, um . . . did you ever give Debbie a key? Maybe someone borrowed hers?” I tried hard to sound totally neutral. That probably didn’t work too well.
Long pause.
“Yes, she had a key,” Alcide said stiffly.
I bit down on my lips so I wouldn’t ask the next question.
“No, I didn’t get it back from her.”
I hadn’t even needed to ask.
Breaking a somewhat charged silence, Alcide suggested we eat a late lunch. Oddly enough, I found I was really hungry.
We ate at Hal and Mal’s, a restaurant close to downtown. It was in an old warehouse, and the tables were just far enough apart to make our conversation possible without anyone calling the police.
“I don’t think,” I murmured, “that anyone could walk around your building with a body over his shoulder, no matter what the hour.”
“We just did,” he said, unanswerably. “I figure it had to have happened between, say, two a.m. and seven. We were asleep by two, right?”
“More like three, considering Eric’s little visit.”
Our eyes met. Eric. Eureka!
“But why would he have done that? Is he nuts about you?” Alcide asked bluntly.
“Not so much nuts,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Oh, wants to get in your pants.”
I nodded, not meeting his eyes.
“Lot of that going around,” Alcide said, under his breath.
“Huh,” I said dismissively. “You’re still hung up on that Debbie, and you know it.”
We looked right at each other. Better to haul this out of the shadows now, and put it to rest.
“You can read my mind better than I thought,” Alcide said. His broad face looked unhappy. “But she’s not . . . Why do I care about her? I’m not sure I even like her. I like the hell out of you.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling from my heart. “I like the hell out of you, too.”
“We’re obviously better for each other than either of the people we’re dating are for us,” he said.
Undeniably true. “Yes, and I would be happy with you.”
“And I’d enjoy sharing my day with you.”
“But it looks like we’re not going to get there.”
“No.” He sighed heavily. “I guess not.”
The young waitress beamed at us as we left, making sure Alcide noticed how well packed into her jeans she was.
“What I think I’ll do,” Alcide said, “is I’ll do my best to yank Debbie out of me by the roots. And then I’ll turn up on your doorstep, one day when you least expect it, and I’ll hope by then you will have given up on your vampire.”
“And then we’ll be happy ever after?” I smiled.
He nodded.
“Well, that’ll be something to look forward to,” I told him.
Chapter Eight
I
WAS SO tired by the time we entered Alcide’s apartment that I was sure all I was good for was a nap. It had been one of the longest days of my life, and it was only the middle of the afternoon.
But we had some housekeeping chores to do first. While Alcide hung the new shower curtain, I cleaned the carpet in the closet with Resolve, and opened one of the air fresheners and placed it on the shelf. We closed all the windows, turned on the heat, and breathed experimentally, our eyes locked on each other’s.
The apartment smelled okay. We simultaneously breathed out a sigh of relief.
“We just did something really illegal,” I said, still uneasy about my own immorality. “But all I really feel is happy we got away with it.”
“Don’t worry about not feeling guilty,” Alcide said. “Something’ll come along pretty soon that you’ll feel guilty about. Save it up.”
This was such good advice that I decided to try it. “I’m going to take a nap,” I said, “so I’ll be at least a little alert tonight.” You didn’t want to be slow on the uptake around vampires.
“Good idea,” Alcide said. He cocked an eyebrow at me, and I laughed, shaking my head. I went in the smaller bedroom and shut the door, taking off my shoes and falling onto the bed with a feeling of quiet delight. I reached over the side of the bed after a moment, grabbed the fringe of the chenille bedspread, and wrapped it around me. In the quiet apartment, with the heating system blowing a steady stream of warm air into the bedroom, it took only a few minutes to fall asleep.
I woke all of a sudden, and I was completely awake. I knew there was someone else in the apartment. Maybe on some level I’d heard a knock on the front door; or maybe I’d registered the rumble of voices in the living room. I swung silently off the bed and padded to the door, my socks making no noise at all on the beige carpet. I had pushed my door to, but not latched it, and now I turned my head to position my ear at the crack.
A deep, gravelly voice said, “Jerry Falcon came to my apartment last night.”
“I don’t know him,” Alcide replied. He sounded calm, but wary.
“He says you got him into trouble at Josephine’s last night.”
“I got him into trouble? If he’s the guy who grabbed my date, he got himself into trouble!”
“Tell me what happened.”
“He made a pass at my date while I was in the men’s room. When she protested, he started manhandling her, and she drew attention to the situation.”
“He hurt her?”
“Shook her up. And he drew some blood on her shoulder.”
“A blood offense.” The voice had become deadly serious.
“Yes.”
So the fingernail gouges on my shoulder constituted a blood offense, whatever that was.
“And then?”
“I came out of the men’s room, hauled him off of her. Then Mr. Hob stepped in.”
“That explains the burns.”
“Yes. Hob threw him out the back door. And that was the last I saw of him. You say his name is Jerry Falcon?”
“Yeah. He came right to my house then, after the rest of the boys left the bar.”
“Edgington intervened. They were about to jump us.”
“Edgington was there?” The deep voice sounded very unhappy.
“Oh, yes, with his boyfriend.”
“How did Edgington get involved?”
“He told them to leave. Since he’s the king, and they work for him from time to time, he expected obedience. But a pup gave him some trouble, so Edgington broke his knee, made the others carry the guy out. I’m sorry there was trouble in your city, Terence. But it was none of our doing.”
“You’ve got guest privileges with our pack, Alcide. We respect you. And those of us who work for the vampires, well, what can I say? Not the best element. But Jerry is their leader, and he was shamed in front of his people last night. How much longer you going to be in our city?”
“Just one more night.”
“And it’s a full moon.”
“Yeah, I know, I’ll try to keep a low profile.”
“What are you going to do tonight? Try to avoid the change, or come out to my hunting land with me?”
“I’ll try to stay out of the moon, try to avoid stress.”
“Then you’ll keep out of Josephine’s.”
“Unfortunately, Russell pretty much demanded that we come back tonight. He felt apologetic that my date went through so much aggravation. He made a point of insisting she come back.”
“Club Dead on a full-moon night, Alcide. This isn’t wise.”
“What am I gonna do? Russell calls the shots in Mississippi.”
“I can understand. But watch out, and if you see Jerry Falcon there, you turn the other way. This is my city.” The deep voice was heavy with authority.
“I understand, Packmaster.”
“Good. Now that you and Debbie Pelt have broken up, I hope it’s a while before we see you back here, Alcide. Give things a chance to settle down. Jerry’s a vindictive son of a bitch. He’ll do you an injury if he can, without starting a feud.”
“He was the one who caused a blood offense.”
“I know, but because of his long association with the vampires, Jerry has too good an opinion of himself. He doesn’t always follow the pack traditions. He only came to me, as he should, because Edgington backed the other side.”
Jerry wasn’t going to be following any tradition anymore. Jerry was lying in the woods to the west.
While I’d napped, it had gotten dark outside. I heard a tap on the glass of the window. I jumped, of course, but then I padded across as quietly as I could. I opened the curtain and held a finger across my lips. It was Eric. I hoped no one on the street outside looked up. He smiled at me and motioned me to open the window. I shook my head vehemently and held my finger across my lips again. If I let Eric in now, Terence would hear, and my presence would be discovered. Terence, I knew instinctively, would not like to find he had been overheard. I tiptoed back to the door and listened. Good-byes were being said. I glanced back at the window, to see that Eric was watching me with great interest. I held up one finger to indicate it would just be a minute.
I heard the apartment door close. Moments later, there was a knock at my door. As I let Alcide in, I hoped I didn’t have those funny creases on my face.
“Alcide, I heard most of that,” I said. “I’m sorry I eavesdropped, but it did seem like it concerned me. Um, Eric is here.”
“So I see,” Alcide said unenthusiastically. “I guess I’d better let him in. Enter, Eric,” he said, as he slid open the window.
Eric entered as smoothly as a tall man can enter a small window. He was wearing a suit, complete with vest and tie. His hair was slicked back into a ponytail. He was also wearing glasses.
“Are you in disguise?” I asked. I could hardly believe it.
“Yes, I am.” He looked down at himself proudly. “Don’t I look different?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “You look just like Eric, dressed up for once.”
“Do you like the suit?”
“Sure,” I said. I have limited knowledge of men’s clothes, but I was willing to bet this sort of olive-brown three-piece ensemble had cost more than I made in two weeks. Or four. I might not have picked this out for a guy with blue eyes, but I had to admit he looked spectacular. If they put out a vampire issue of
GQ,
he’d definitely be in the running for a photo shoot. “Who did your hair?” I asked, noticing for the first time that it had been braided in an intricate pattern.
“Oooh, jealous?”
“No, I thought maybe they could teach me how to do that to mine.”
Alcide had had enough of fashion commentary. He said belligerently, “What do you mean by leaving the dead man in my closet?”
I have seldom seen Eric at a loss for words, but he was definitely speechless—for all of thirty seconds.
“It wasn’t Bubba in the closet, was it?” he asked.
It was our turn to stand with mouths open, Alcide because he didn’t know who the hell Bubba was, and me because I couldn’t imagine what could have happened to the dazed vampire.
I hastily filled Alcide in on Bubba.
“So that explains all the sightings,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “Damn—they were all for real!”
“The Memphis group wanted to keep him, but it was just impossible,” Eric explained. “He kept wanting to go home, and then there’d be incidents. So we started passing him around.”
“And now you’ve lost him,” Alcide observed, not too chagrined by Eric’s problem.
“It’s possible that the people who were trying to get to Sookie in Bon Temps got Bubba instead,” Eric said. He tugged on his vest and looked down with some satisfaction. “So, who was in the closet?”
“The biker who marked Sookie last night,” Alcide said. “He made a pretty rough pass at her while I was in the men’s room.”
“Marked her?”
“Yes, blood offense,” Alcide said significantly.
“You didn’t say anything about this last night.” Eric raised an eyebrow at me.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” I said. I didn’t like the way that came out, kind of forlorn. “Besides, it wasn’t much blood.”
“Let me see.”
I rolled my eyes, but I knew darn good and well that Eric wouldn’t give up. I pulled my sweatshirt off my shoulder, along with my bra strap. Luckily, the sweatshirt was so old, the neck had lost its elasticity, and it afforded enough room. The fingernail gouges on my shoulder were crusted half-moons, puffy and red, though I’d scrubbed the area carefully the night before. I know how many germs are under fingernails. “See,” I said. “No big deal. I was more mad than scared or hurt.”
Eric kept his eyes on the little nasty wounds until I shrugged my clothes back into order. Then he switched his eyes to Alcide. “And he was dead in the closet?”
“Yes,” Alcide said. “Had been dead for hours.”
“What killed him?”
“He hadn’t been bitten,” I said. “He looked as though his neck might have been broken. We didn’t feel like looking that closely. You’re saying you aren’t the guilty party?”
“No, though it would have been a pleasure to have done it.”
I shrugged, not willing to explore that dark thought. “So, who put him there?” I asked, to get the discussion going again.
“And why?” Alcide asked.
“Would it be too much to ask where he is now?” Eric managed to look as if he were indulging two rowdy children.
Alcide and I shot each other glances. “Um, well, he’s . . .” My voice trailed away.